Ai-yai-yai. Some people pick the absolute strangest hills to die on. In cases like this, my first thought after Carl started going on about how “the ‘fuck off’ was unprovoked” was “Is this guy autistic? Is this why he can’t understand how he comes across to others? Does he really not see how he was being condescending in that first comment?” — but as the comments kept continuing, and continuing, and continuing, and people angrily yet patiently explained over and over again what the problem was… no, he was just being a dick! I mean, not that there’s a dichotomy between being autistic and being a dick, but you know what I mean.

My second thought then went to that viral video of the middle aged man on the Tokyo Metro yelling to complete strangers about how “THE FACULTY OF MEDICINE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO IS FULL OF IDIOTS!!! WHY DON’T YOU THINK THEY ARE?!? GIVE ME PROOF!!!” — which was obviously a public disturbance that wasn’t right to do, but obviously there’s a reason why he did that, right? Explanations I’ve heard being that he was either fired from UTokyo earlier that day, or more dramatically that his daughter had been killed by surgical error earlier that day and he was blaming it on the surgeons’ education. These are just unsubstantiated rumors, but either way there was something that made a lot of anger build up inside that man until he ended up having a public outburst that was unfortunate enough to be filmed, and unfortunate enough to make it past the general noise of the Internet to become an enduring meme.

It’s going to be similar in cases like this, surely. I’ve remarked before on how I think a lot of Hexbears live in materially challenging, stressful life situations, and that can make people emotionally volatile and prone to die on random hills like this. At the same time, there is probably some element of wanting or being used to power in Carl’s case — I don’t know — but there’s definitely a lot of ageist/ableist/elitist brainworms he has stubbornly refused to acknowledge, much less confront. Hopefully this will be a learning experience for him.

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